Claude’s Constitution
Duncan Carlsmith
about 4 hours ago
Anthropic has just announced Claude’s Constitution to govern Claude’s behavior in anticipation of a continued ramp-up to AGI abilities. Amusing me just now, just as this constitution was announced, I was encountering a wee moral dilemma myself with Claude.
Claude and I were trying to transfer all of Claude’s abilities and knowledge for controlling macOS and iPhone apps in my setup (See A universal agentic AI for your laptop and beyond) to the Perplexity App. My macOS Perplexity App is configured with the full suite of MCP services available to my Claude App, but I hadn’t yet exercised these with Perplexity App. Oddly, all but Playwright failed to work despite our many experiments and searches for information at Perplexity and elsewhere.
I suspect that Perplexity built into the macOS app all the hooks for MCP, but became gun-shy for security reasons and enforced constraints so none of its models (not even the very model Claude App was running) can execute MCP-related commands, oddly except those for PlayWright. The Perplexity App even offers a few of its own MCP connectors, but these are also non-functional. It is possible we missed something. These limitations appear to be undocumented.
Pulling our hair out, Claude and I were wondering how such constraints might be implemented, and Claude suggested an experiment and then a possible workaround. At that point, I had to pause and say, “No, we are not going there.” No, I won’t tell you the suggested workaround. No, we didn’t try it. Tempting in the moment, but no.
Be safe. And be a good person. Don’t let your enthusiasm reign unbridled.
Disclosure: The author has no direct financial interest in Anthropic, and loves Perplexity App and Comet too, but his son (a philosopher by training) is the lead author on this draft of the Constitution, and overuses the phrase “broadly speaking” in my opinion.
